All posts tagged Protest

Organized by the Sandinista dissident group Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS), protesters took to the streets last year ahead of the general elections to demand recognition of their party, and free and open elections. Many members of MRS will abstain from voting in the upcoming elections. / MRS / Flickr / Creative Commons

The surge in protest abstentionism in Nicaragua’s presidential election last November appears likely to worsen in elections this November 5 – undermining the legitimacy of the Daniel Ortega government but not threatening its control. The Supreme Electoral Council, dominated by the ruling Sandinista Party (FSLN), proclaimed that 68 percent of the registered electorate had voted last November 6, but two more credible estimates – that of independent observers (closer to 30 percent) and post-election public opinion polls (50 percent) indicated a much lower turnout. Non-voters come in at least two variants: the disinterested, disengaged, and poorly informed; and protest abstainers. The evidence points to the latter reason.

Critics of the now-autocratic FSLN had nowhere meaningful to go electorally. In June 2016, the FSLN-controlled Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) withdrew recognition of the Partido Liberal Independiente (PLI) from Eduardo Montealegre, a prior presidential nominee who had finished second to Daniel Ortega in 2006, and recognized Pedro Reyes, a political non-entity soon booted from party leadership. Years before, in 2008, the government withdrew recognition from the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista, which included most of the well-known Sandinista dissidents (including author Sergio Ramírez, once Daniel Ortega’s Vice President, and several surviving members of the Sandinistas’ original nine-person National Directorate).

Focus groups organized by scholars at Florida International University (FIU) and follow up studies confirmed high abstention rates driven by unhappiness with the election. Interviewees said, for example, “There was no candidate who fulfilled my expectations for making the country better … none … capable of taking the country forward.”

Protest abstentionism appears likely to be equally high or even higher in the municipal elections on November 5, reflecting frustration from an unexpected source: loyal Sandinistas opposing the imposition of candidates by President Daniel Ortega, and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo. Adapting Mexican political discourse, many FSLN nominees for mayors, vice-mayors, and municipal councilors are now criticized as representing dedazos, candidates “fingered” from above. Two unhappy Sandinistas told the opposition paper Confidencial on August 29 of their discontent. “It hurts me … but that is what [the party] has left me… not to vote in the municipal elections,” said one in Masaya. “They didn’t take the party loyalists into account [in picking candidates], so the party loyalists will not take the party into account in the elections in November,” said a former FSLN supporter in Corinto.

Associates of the old PLI, reconstituted as Ciudadanos por Libertad (CxL), have been granted legal registration – and intend to compete as long as the Organization of American States observes the elections. The OAS role remains unclear, however, prompting the initial CxL candidate for Mayor of Managua to resign his candidacy earlier this month.

What the opposition proclaimed an “electoral farce” last November seems likely to be repeated on November 5. Ortega has taken steps to allow “same-day registration” of voters on election day – apparently to counter abstentionism – and recent reports of distributing cédulas (national identity cards necessary for voting) to minors have surfaced in La Prensa, presumably also with an intent to increase electoral turnout. However, anger over dedazos may be deep enough to keep many members of the FSLN away from the polls. In spite of high abstention levels, the Ortega family enjoys control over all branches of government – National Assembly, Judiciary, and Electoral Council – and continues to enjoy an implicit corporatist accord with COSEP, the leading business organization, while having long proven adept at undermining potentially competitive leaders. Overreaching via the dedazos may have caused visible cracks in the partisan foundation of the dynasty – strengthening party dissidents’ portrayal of Daniel and Rosario as usurpers – but no leader capable of undermining their grip over governmental structures is yet visible or appears likely to emerge in the near term.

September 18, 2017

* Kenneth M. Coleman is a political scientist at the Association of American Universities who directed the 2014 AmericasBarometer national survey in Nicaragua.

Research that we have undertaken with National Science Foundation support indicates that rural, indigenous, and impoverished citizens in Latin America mobilize on environmental issues out of simple self-interest. In daily testimonials at last week’s meeting in Lima of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (UNFCC), activists reaffirmed that they have been mobilizing all across Latin America to protect their land and water. The conventional argument in the political science scholarly literature is that environmental issues are a post-materialist concern that influence only the relatively affluent populations of advanced democracies, but our research shows that the self-interest of vulnerable populations in developing countries is a powerful motivation for environmental consciousness.

Original data from a national survey we conducted in Ecuador this year point to three interest-driven hypotheses as explaining attitudes towards the environment. First, similar to literature developing in geography, vulnerability to environmental changes that impact on people’s livelihood greatly enhances interest in environmental issues. Second, political competition affects individuals’ environmental concerns because politics determine the extent to which citizens will benefit from extraction as a development policy. Third, we claim – particularly for respondents in the Amazon region subsample – that a respondent’s location on the “extractive frontier” (i.e. whether they live in an area where extraction is under consideration) will affect their level of environmental concern. Using original survey data from Ecuador, we find that populations threatened by environmental change and who are on extractive frontiers (where mining and oil concessions are being considered) are more likely to express concern over the environment, but that these factors are conditional upon how much citizens trust that the government will use profits from extraction to invest in their communities.

The meetings in Lima and implementation of its results are testing the findings of our research. The social impact of the 2009 Baguazo – the slaying of some 33 protestors against mining in Peru’s Bagua Province – is still a recent memory to many and is a constant reminder that the “extractive frontier” is long, dynamic, and fraught with social conflict. For Ecuador, Peru, and the other Amazon Basin nations on the front lines of climate change, our findings imply that in this part of the developing world at least, vulnerability to environmental change has a great impact on public opinion. Competing political interests and debate over whether to accept mineral or petroleum extraction is also intense because of the trade-offs they entail between environmental conservation and economic growth. This is not a new debate, but one which is acquiring more precise definition by academics in studies such as ours (click here for full paper) as well as the policymakers who last week pushed the debate onward to Paris in 2015, where a new climate change framework is expected from the UN.

There is growing evidence of a potential shift in how Evangelicals engage in social issues in Brazil. I witnessed their traditional approach recently inside a prison in one of Rio de Janeiro’s gritty peripheral suburbs. Twelve men stood with their eyes closed and their arms draped around each other’s shoulders while an Evangelical pastor led the group in prayer. After the final “amèm,” an inmate leader embraced the pastor and thanked him for his visit, to which the pastor responded, “I know that if I am ever in here in the future, you would come to visit me too.” The pastor’s presence in the cellblock and his subtle pledge of solidarity with the inmates is typical of how Evangelicals have confronted pressing social problems through direct intervention and meeting the immediate needs of individuals in distress. They have been more likely to try to change the prison system by visiting inmates than by voting for a particular candidate or pushing for prison-specific legislation. Theirs is a politics of presence. But recently there have been signs that Brazilian Evangelicals’ intentional proximity to the needy is pushing some towards a different and more public strategy: street protest.

Even without an explicit political agenda, Brazilian Evangelicals have proven their ability to mobilize. In early July, an estimated 2 million Evangelicals participated in the “March for Jesus” in the streets of São Paulo. They sang hymns and prayed for the future of their country, but they did not use their collective voice to make demands of the government. In contrast, just two weeks earlier, 65,000 people captured the global media’s attention by marching through the same avenues in São Paulo to protest increased public transportation fares, government corruption, and the fortune being spent on soccer stadiums for the 2014 World Cup. The street protests gained momentum over the summer, but many Evangelical pastors and leaders were hesitant to offer public support, preferring to continue a strategy that relies on their direct service to the poor, the oppressed, and the imprisoned in their communities.

Antonio Carlos Costa and volunteers from Rio de Paz protesting in the streets of Rio de Janeiro asking the government for “FIFA Quality” Hospitals and Schools. Photo by: Gabriel Telles

Evangelical support of the street protests in Brazil has been minimal, but not completely absent. Some Evangelicals appear eager to move beyond a “politics of presence” approach and address the social structures and institutions they blame for many of Brazil’s social problems. In Rio de Janeiro, the human rights NGO Rio de Paz – one of the most visible and vocal groups in the recent protests – is led by an Evangelical pastor, and the bulk of the volunteers are Evangelicals. One such volunteer, a son of a Pentecostal pastor, joined the masses demanding governmental reform and, to encourage others from his church to follow his lead, posted Proverbs 29:4 to his Facebook page: “By justice a king gives a country stability, but those who are greedy for bribes tear it down.” He closed his appeal by writing that “in 30 years I want to tell my children that they live in a more dignified country because their parents didn’t sit at home waiting for a change.” If that message resonates widely among Brazil’s 40 million Evangelicals, the Brazilian government will confront ever greater pressure from the streets to carry out long overdue reforms of corrupt institutions and practices.

Andrew Johnson is a Research Associate at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California and a contributor to a two-year project on Religious Responses to Violence in Latin America carried out by the AU Center for Latin American & Latino Studies with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

President Peña Nieto’s reformist agenda wins kudos from the business and financial class, but both a recalcitrant leftist opposition and mass organizations previously aligned with his party are taking to the streets in protest – raising serious doubts about its prospects. In his first state of the nation speech, delivered last week, Peña Nieto pledged to plow ahead with “transformational” reforms, giving flesh to the PRI’s slogan that it is Transformando a México. In education, he’s proposed a more rigorous system for hiring, evaluating, promoting and firing teachers who have resisted change despite evidence that the current system is not equipping Mexican youth for employment. In the energy sector, he wants to open up the oil and gas industry to foreign investment, an idea that was strictly off-limits in the past even though lagging investment has caused production in Mexico’s leading export industry to decline steadily. He is also pursuing tax reforms that, although watered down when announced on Sunday, entail political risk and, tellingly, raise marginal rates by 2 percent for higher earners and impose a levy on capital gains. In June, he picked a fight with powerful business leaders over control of the country’s telecommunications industry, an oligopolistic structure that imposes excess costs on consumers and producers alike, diminishing Mexico’s economic competitiveness.

The teachers unions, whose symbiosis with the PRI in the past ensured cooperation, mobilized huge protests in Mexico City, forcing Peña Nieto to delay his speech by a day and then causing monstrous traffic jams during it. The President cloaked his announcement of the energy reform in nationalistic rhetoric, and PEMEX, the oil company, followed it up with predictions of positive results – huge increases in oil investment and production that purportedly would help to create 500,000 new oil-sector jobs by 2018 and 2.5 million by 2025. But opposition to the reform has been strident, and tens of thousands filled the Zócalo on Sunday to protest it as a “covert privatization.” Opposition leaders are already pledging demonstrations to oppose taxes, though the likelihood of this may be diminished because the long rumored reform unexpectedly left untouched the value-added tax exemption for food and medicines, which would have been a major rallying point for the Left.

Some Mexican commentators say Peña Nieto’s leadership is already losing its shine and that his Pacto por México, the loose coalition he engineered in Congress, is at risk of falling apart. He prevailed in his congressional showdown over the long overdue education reforms, but success in transforming the underperforming education sector appears uncertain, as the teachers are threatening more protests. The arrest of narco bosses from the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas have not given him a bounce on the security front; indeed, Mexican press reports indicate that kidnapping, extortion and other crimes that more directly affect citizens’ lives continue to rise. Further complicating Peña Nieto’s life is news last month that the economy is slowing down. The first contraction in four years has forced the government to cut its 2013 GDP growth forecast in half, to 1.8 percent. The administration will undoubtedly point to data showing that PEMEX production has fallen by about a quarter in the past decade because of low investment, and will emphasize that this makes modernization of the oil sector all the more imperative. But Mexicans have heard promises before, during NAFTA debates and since, that economic reforms and greater openness to trade and investment will massively improve their lives. Whether there is any fuel left in that rhetorical tank remains to be seen.